I'm in between you and MM, I guess. This news doesn't kill the hype for me but it doesn't excite me much either. I have mixed feelings on what very little we've seen, and that's primarily because there are so many different ways it could go and I like some of them while disliking others. Really won't know where I fall until I play the game myself.

I was already planning on getting the games at launch but was also already expecting them to be nothing more than an ORAS-flavored Platinum, i.e. like Platinum it's a same-gen retelling with tweaks but like ORAS the tweaks are rather significant and impact the main narrative both before and after the E4. So for me, the excitement has been (on a scale of -10 to +10) a 0 or +1 this entire time. I'm calmly, pleasantly looking forward to playing, but I'm not expecting much.

What has most excited me is speculation fans are making based on a comment that (iirc) Ohmori Shigeru made in a very recent interview. A reporter had asked him how long the game (USUM) would be, and he answered in such a way that has fans speculating that:

When you beat the Elite Four this time around, you'll only have just reached the halfway point. Furthermore, you'll beat the Elite Four roughly around the same time you did so in SM. So if the average player reached them in ~30 hours, fans are speculating that USUM will require ~60 hours to complete, even for the average PokéFaithful player!

If the fans' speculations check out, then this is very exciting news indeed.

I know I was personally surprised by just how quickly Sun's ending crept up on me. (I took ~80 hours to complete Y leisurely, whereas the same leisurely stroll through Sun saw me beating the game in the 30 to 35-hour range.) Generally speaking, I'd welcome a longer Story Mode.

There's also then the consideration that if the story mode length is roughly doubled, famously the only other time that's really happened was in Gen 2 -- in Gen 2, where we had two regions. Most of the fan speculation seems to be focused on USUM going "The first half is SM while the second half is Ultra Space," but I also wonder if we might not go somewhere else instead for the second half. For right now, I think the safer bet is on Ultra Space. It could even be the case that you visit very small pockets of all the past regions when cornering each of the Ultra Beasts. (So like, you fight Buzzwole atop an erupting Cinnabar Island volcano; you fight Kartana in Eterna Forest; etc.) But I'm not ready to rule out the possibility that all of the Ultra Space, Ultra Beast stuff is more of an optional post-game feature (much like how UBs are in Sun and Moon) and that the reason the game's story is going to take twice as long to beat this go around as last time is because we're returning to some familiar region.

Hell -- what if the recon squad turns out to be the evolution of one of our familiar villain teams from a past game, only they dress differently and have a different history now because they come from an alternate timeline where Necrozma caused shit? What if, for example, the recon squad turns out to be alternate universe Galactics? What if they turn out to be alternate universe Plasmas? And, of course, what if they turn out to be alternate universe Rockets? We'll really just have to wait and see.

Do we know anything yet regarding the Festival Plaza in Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon? I know it's one of the most complained-about features in Sun & Moon, and I'm curious to see if they revamped it or not for USUM. Hopefully they did. Would not be surprised if they did not, though. (But would be very surprised if it's not overhauled for Pokémon's Switch debut!)

Do we know anything yet regarding the Festival Plaza in Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon? I know it's one of the most complained-about features in Sun & Moon, and I'm curious to see if they revamped it or not for USUM. Hopefully they did. Would not be surprised if they did not, though. (But would be very surprised if it's not overhauled for Pokémon's Switch debut!)

The Mega Stone codes for Sun and Moon expired yesterday ... which all but confirms what we all were already expecting: every Mega Stone will be available without the use of codes in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.

Sad face though because I procrastinated getting duplicates on Moon and now I can't have any. Sigh/Oh well. My Moon copy was always meant to be the copy that would get reset, so I guess this just gives me one more reason to not feel bad about hard resetting if and when I do.

Maybe they will reconsider, now that the codes are gone, and they will actually patch the Battle Tree to sell you every possible stone instead of only one quarter of them. Doubtful, but I can always hope.

Regarding the newest trailer ... this is the first massive spoiler for USUM that I honestly regret discovering. :\ Would've been epic to have discovered this entirely by surprise, caught completely unawares, while playing through the story mode of the game. If you just so happen to be reading this thread and yet somehow haven't been spoiled yet about what new news has been revealed, I would say "Stay away from all Pokémon news sites from now until the time you complete Story Mode in USUM yourself." That is, if you care about being spoiled on story elements.

The Return of Team Rocket: It's interesting. I'm 50/50 on it. On the one hand, I really dislike Game Freak and their affiliates fucking with the canon of RGB and making it so that Giovanni hasn't truly reformed, that there's still a Rocket threat even after the events of GSC, etc. On the other hand, I really like seeing them use the alternate universes Pandora's Box that they've opened to full effect to explore fan fictions daydreams like this. "What if there were a universe in which Team Rocket hadn't been successfully defeated by Red?" Check. "What if there were a setting in which Giovanni gathered together all of the other crime bosses and led a 'dream team' of evil?" Check. These are the sorts of things that, for me, have absolutely no place in the "main canon" of the franchise ... and yet are innocuous to explore, and a delight for all who naturally love them, in side games and sequels and the like. It's much easier to write off an ORAS or a USUM as "not canon" than it is to write off an XY or an SM. I dunno. It's just well orchestrated, I guess is what I'm saying.

Rainbow Rocket - the merger of every syndicate in Pokémon history! : Now this I'm a lot less happy about, personally. Despite just saying how I think it's clever of Game Freak to make full use of the alternate realities detail that is now a locked-in part of our series' canon, I'm not a particularly big fan about this SPECIFIC execution. "Giovanni gathers together the likes of Maxie, Archie, Cyrus, and Ghetsis and gets them to all work together under his leadership." Uhh ... no?

For starters, Cyrus a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y doesn't belong there. His whole entire thing was, "Life is suffering. The universe as we know it is built upon a set of rules that inevitably leads to suffering. I hate suffering. Thus, I seek to build a new universe with a new set of rules -- a universe rid of suffering." Why would this 'suffering sux' guy team up with a crime boss and help him conquer the planet while keeping all the rules of the universe the same? Vice versa, why would Giovanni have any interest in soliciting help from a man whom he knows the endgoal for whom to be, "I want to scrap everything you've worked so hard to acquire and create a new world in which people like yourself won't exist and there won't be any such person who can be said to be 'the king of the world'"? Their endgoals are in direct conflict with one another. Cyrus doesn't want suffering --> doesn't want trainers having their hearts broken when TR steals their Pokémon --> doesn't want to help TR. Giovanni wants to be king of the world --> wants to be king of this world --> wants to be king of a world in which there are the Haves (i.e. himself!) and the Have Nots (i.e. everyone else!) --> doesn't want anything to do with Cyrus's world.

Then there's Ghetsis. What the fuck is Ghetsis doing here being subject to Giovanni? Ghetsis is pretty much "Unova Giovanni", so like ... they should be direct competitors, not master and servant. Even if I were to believe that they could be teammates, it would have to be under the circumstances of a Rocket-Plasma alliance, not a ... "Ghetsis is on the Council of Villains at TR Headquarters" like we have here.

It's also pretty difficult to see how Giovanni could have both Villainous Maxie and Villainous Archie on his team at once. HEROIC Maxie and HEROIC Archie, he could have at once. Except he couldn't, because heroes wouldn't be a part of Team Rocket. VILLAINOUS Maxie or VILLAINOUS Archie, he can only have one or the other at once: their goals are mutually exclusive and they have yet to renounce them. They're also not fools enough (certainly not ORAS-re-envisioned Maxie) to believe whatever bullshit Giovanni might try to feed to them were he to try and persuade them that he is going to give each of them what they want. The moment Villainous Maxie sees Archie sitting at that council table, he's going to turn right the fuck around and leave the building.

So I dunno ... I think this plot really is more fan fic than story. It shares two things in common with most fan fictions:

That second part, you are all more than welcome to criticize me for leaping to conclusions prematurely. In fact, please -- LET ME BE WRONG! I'd love to be wrong on this one. 'Cause it's not about being right or wrong here -- it's about having a good story and a great game for our community to rally around and enjoy. I want a great game. I want an epic, glorious Pokémon experience. So sure. Surprise me, Game Freak! Show me how this story can possibly work. I'll be waiting with bated breath.

Ultra Space Wormholes & Light Years: The newest trailer reveals something else that sort of reeks to me of bad writing. It says that one of the portals you appear through takes you some 3,500-ish light years away. Uhhhhhhhhhhh ... what? What do light years (a measure of distance for distances traveled within our own universe) have ANYTHING to do with extra-dimensional travel? I thought we were flitting between different REALITIES, different TIMELINES, different EXISTENCES. Not this ... "you travel to a galaxy in the Oort Cloud billions of miles away and WHOA SHIT! SUDDEN EARTH-372 CLONE SPOTTED!" nonsense. This is just a personal gripe. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are more than satisfied with an interpretation of the Universe which speaks to there being nigh-infinite repeats of our very planet, given the scales of "infinity" and whatnot. I just ... I personally don't really buy it even for our own universe at this point. I think the Universe is massive and deals with infinities, e.g. an ever-expanding or ever-contracting boundary, but I don't subscribe to the notion that it truly has infinite matter inside of it. If you want to talk true infinities of possibility, I feel like you have to start talking multiverse theory. And interdimensional or multiverse travel has got nothing to do with light years traveled.

Worth buying the game? : All my negativity aside, I think all of this new plot (however bad it might end up being) absolutely makes these games a must-have purchase for hardcore Pokémon players. This is not like Emerald or Platinum where you can optionally sit out a story that is mostly the same with a few cosmetic changes. This is essentially a brand-new chapter set in an alternate reality to the one we saw in Sun and Moon. While it might not be a narrative sequel in the sense that Black 2 and White 2 were, it's looking every bit as important to own and play through as those two games were. ORAS you could sit out. HGSS you could sit out. This ... you can't really sit out. If you consider yourself a fan of the Pokémon video games and want to say "I've played them all," then you really have to give this game a shot.

It's increasingly obvious why we've heard them say that "if Sun and Moon took you 30 hours to complete then Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon will probably take you 60." This looks to be a massive story arc that they're introducing here with Rainbow Rocket. I can't appreciate whether it takes place fully after, fully before, or a mix of before and after the "main story" from SM, but wherever it takes place, it's looking like it's going to add tons of hours to the plot. The Rainbow Rocket headquarters alone look like a 5-to-10-hour episode, considering you'll have to: meet every boss; talk briefly with every boss; navigate through a stereotypical Rocket-style fortress, fighting grunts along the way; fight every boss at least once; talk with Giovanni (and possibly the other bosses too) after you defeat Giovanni and take down Rainbow Rocket.

Lusamine: If there is one silver lining to all of this cloud ... it's Lusamine's role in this. I'm very interested to see what's going to happen with her in this story. She's noticeably absent from the Rainbow Rocket footage. And the memorable scene of her in the trailer telling the children to "run away" and "He's a ... monster!" ............... Originally, I thought she was talking about Necrozma there. And she still might be! But now I have to entertain the other possibility that she's actually talking about Giovanni. :o That Giovanni appears mid-story. And that he's the one who sucks Lusamine away through an Ultra Space portal. No matter how her story unfolds -- Lusamine, the Pokémon fanatic who describes Necrozma as "a monster"; or Lusamine, the mama bear who tells her cubs to run from the demon that is RR Giovanni -- either way, I'm super stoked for her story.